Paige Birgfeld, 34, slain mother of three from Grand Junction, led a double life, also working for an escort service.

The soccer-mom/stripper murder investigation was a process of elimination and it took seven years.

Before the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department felt comfortable arresting Lester Ralph Jones in the death of Paige Birgfeld, they had to discount the possibility that many other men may have been culpable.

It was a time-consuming, meticulous process.

Key events happened along the way. The biggest was the discovery of Birgfeld’s remains by a hiker in the Wells Gulch area in Delta County on May 6, 2012.

But in the end what made the difference wasn’t new gotcha evidence like a fingerprint or a DNA link. The determining evidence was circumstantial and known by Mesa County Sheriff’s deputies since the beginning of the investigation.

“We believe at this point we have crossed off the list all the things we needed to do to make an arrest,” Mesa County Sheriff-elect Matt Lewis said in a news conference Friday. “There’s not a significant event as much as this is an exhaustive process we’ve been going through.”

Many of the clues that led to Jones’ arrest were known within days or weeks of Birgfeld’s disappearance on June 30, 2007.

When she vanished, Birgfeld was for many just a devoted mother holding down several different jobs to support her three young children and hold onto her upscale Grand Junction home. The twice-divorced Birgfeld sold Pampered Chef products and homemade baby slings from her home.

By day, the bubbly, friendly, outspoken woman was a doting mom, but by night she was a high-priced call girl who charged clients nearly $3,000 for a single evening. She had advertised in-call and out-call services under the alias of “Carrie” on a website called NaughtyNightlife.com and scheduled liaisons with other call girls.

Comments Off on Mesa County: arrest made in death of soccer mom turned escort

The runner had just passed the same area along the Santa Fe Trail on the East side of Fountain Creek about 30 minutes earlier at 10:30 a.m. and hadn’t seen the dead man.

Several other people using the trail soon gathered near the body. Colorado Springs police were called.

The dead man had long shaggy, graying hair. He had been stabbed several times.

The amount of bleeding at the location where he was found suggested it was the same spot where he had been attacked, just south of Cimmaron Bridge.

A perimeter was set up. The El Paso County coroner’s office was called and the crime scene was searched.

The bearded dead man was a well-known transient, whose campsite was about three-quarters of a mile away.

John Vincent Knudsen was described by family as somewhat of a gypsy.

After his birth in Fort Ord, Calif., in 1956 Knudsen traveled through Europe and the United States as his father was frequently transferred to new U.S. Army assignments.

“These years of traveling, seeing new places, meeting new people and experiencing new things continued to influence John throughout the remainder of his life,” family members would write in an obituary.

He had gone throughout the country as a long-haul driver. He once worked in construction.

“John’s love for his dogs is legendary,” the obituary says.

Everywhere he went he was flanked by Reuben, Rusty or Booger Ray, his canine friends.

Comments Off on Colorado Springs “gypsy” stabbed in broad daylight on popular trail

By the day he was kidnapped and murdered, Thomas Ray Carpenter had been a Colorado state trooper for five years. The 31-year-old man had become a trooper in 1968 after serving three years in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was a highly regarded and decorated trooper.

Trooper Thomas Carpenter, 31

Carpenter was married to Phyllis and the couple had three young children, ages 9, 7, and 4. They lived in Lafayette. He was a quiet, religious man who didn’t drink alcohol. He wanted to make a career of being a CSP trooper.

Carpenter was assigned to the Colorado State Patrol’s Broomfield district that Thursday, Dec. 27, 1973. He worked the Interstate 25 corridor.

9:58 a.m.

He drove to the side of U.S. 36 near Broadway that morning. A car was pulled off on the shoulder of the highway. Carpenter was either intending to see if he could help a stranded motorist or he had seen something that appeared to be suspicious.

He did not make a radio report that he had pulled over at the time. Witnesses would later tell police that they saw Carpenter driving a patrol car with two men in the back seat at about the same time.

That morning at 9:58 a.m., Carpenter received a call from a dispatcher to go to an accident at East 58th Avenue and I-25. He told the dispatcher that he was at Interstate 70 and Havana at the time.

That was somewhat odd. He was about eight miles east from the area he was supposed to patrol.

10:04 a.m.

A dispatcher called again six minutes after the first call to ask Carpenter if he was going to the accident.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.